RE-1 Valley Board of Education discusses Common Core Standards

Hear update on enrollment

STERLING — The RE-1 Valley Board of Education discussed the Common Core Standards at a workshop in Tuesday.

A couple of board members and Superintendent Dr. Jan DeLay are working on a presentation on Common Core Standards and assessments to give to the community. They've already presented the information to teachers at a district Response to Intervention (RtI) and they'll be presenting it to administrators during an Administrative Council meeting today.

“The intention is to depoliticize some of the data surrounding Common Core,” board member BJ Ball said. “The Common Core is really nothing more than defining what is proficiency. You can define what a gallon is, you can define what a foot is, you define all those measurements that are necessary for states to compare each other, but proficiency within the school, when they came out with our children are behind, was never defined. So, the Common Core was actually the state driven attempt to define what does proficient mean, so that as you went across all different states and in schools and all the different programs, there was some sort of measurement.”

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Ball described the Common Core as the measuring stick and how it's implemented are the blueprints, “the way in which you measure it like the way you deal with the government before you get your permits and your assessments would be in line with evaluations of your inspections.”

“The idea is that the Common Core itself has nothing to do with whether or not the kid is being tested in math, whether or not teachers are getting paid for performance. Those are separate issues from the Common Core,” he said.

Ball said that RE-1 has been proactive “in terms of at least trying to get ahead of it and availing ourselves of the pilot programs and those sorts of things. But, being a pilot program there were a number of assessment tools that were coming to us and we had a general sense of how they would work so our kids would be ahead of the curve as those things came on within Colorado.”

DeLay shared an article with the board from the July edition of The Weekly Standard, “The Common Core Commotion,” written by Andrew Ferguson. The article states the Common Core leaves off proficiencies of studying the Constitution past when gun rights were added, but DeLay pointed out the Common Core is mathematics and literacy, not government, and the district has separate standards that address government and the Constitution.

“So, when people throw in these kinds of statements as if they're fact and people read that and they just assume that they're fact, I think our board needs to help people be more critical thinkers,” she said.

In other business, DeLay gave an update on enrollment.

“Because of Infinite Campus not being able to get rid of the kids that may or may not be here until another school requests records, I don't have a good picture on that,” she said.

She shared some information about last year's numbers. Last year Ayres Elementary had 355.5 students, Caliche Elementary had 143.5, Campbell Elementary had 415, Sterling Middle School had 139 and Sterling High School had 566.5.

DeLay has started to get information about new admissions and withdrawals at each school; she will also be trying to gather reasons for why students are withdrawing. Based on the information she's got so far, she talked to the board about enrollment at each school.

“The trends that I'm seeing is that Ayres looks like it's probably going to be up over last year, but it's hard to tell with kindergartners coming in and it's just in too much of a state of flux to make much of a guess,” she said.

Caliche's enrollment looks like it's up slightly and Campbell looks like it's down slightly, because they lost a large group of students to SMS, therefore SMS looks like it's up slightly.

“We do have a pretty good influx of kids at (SHS)s ... a few from St. Anthony's, but there's a few coming from institutions and foster placements. So, there's some influx of kids that are going to be needing some more TLC,” DeLay said.

The board also reviewed district data. DeLay shared with the board the Unified Improvement Plan the district received from the state last week, which they will be completing this year. It shows that the district meets the achievement standards and is approaching in the academic growth and growth gap standards.

They also discussed Transitional Colorado Assessment Program (TCAP) results

Assistant Superintendent Ron Marostica talked about what the district is doing with students with learning disabilities.

“We have more IEP (Individualized Education Plan) kids from every district around us than we deserve and I'm not complaining about that,” he said, but he pointed out that “one could assume, well a kid that has an IEP, of course they're not going to go far, but that's not true.”

To show that's not true he discussed the results for students with disabilities, noting for example, in the 10th grade there were 29 students with IEPs and in writing only three students came in unsatisfactory.

Overall about the results, Marostica said “it's not perfect, but we've come along way,” also noting that “we still have a lot of work to do.”

PARCC (Partnerships for Assessments of Readiness for College and Careers) exams will take the place of TCAP next year and DeLay said those assessments are “much more rigorous.”

Additionally, the board talked about the budget/negotiations timeline and working to get the negotiations policies aligned with the new way the district is doing negotiations. Board members will work with teachers to rework the policies.

DeLay also gave an update on the District Accountability Advisory Board. She met with them on Aug. 25 and they discussed what the group wants to look at with the perception and learning data for the district, as well as the board's idea to have a student liaison to the board. The committee suggested there be student liaisons at the DAAC level and they can also be contacts with the school board. School board members were fine with that.

RE-1 Valley School District has announced its policy for determining eligibility of children who may receive free and reduced price meals served under the National School Lunch and School Breakfast Program.
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